High Protein Diet

Benefits Of A High Protein Diet

Whether you’re looking to lose fat, build muscle, or improve your sports performance, a high protein diet can get you there.

You’ve likely read about the importance of protein when researching nutrition protocols.

But, what are the real benefits of a high protein diet? And more important, how much protein is too much?

Let’s get these questions answered for you right now.

Lean Mass Retention

The first benefits of a high protein diet is that it’ll help you retain your lean muscle mass.

When you are using a lower calorie diet plan, there’s a greater chance that your body will start utilising incoming protein as a fuel source, meaning there is less left over to sustain your lean mass stores.

This in turn could lead to a loss of muscle mass if you aren’t careful.

By consuming more protein in your daily diet, you’ll ensure you keep your muscles ‘topped-up’ with protein rather than your body using it from your muscles as a fuel source.

Hunger Control

The second reason to use a high protein diet is for hunger control.

If you seek fat loss, hunger is the one factor that can completely throw you off your game.

Protein rich foods take longer to digest than carbohydrate rich foods, so adding them to each meal can help prolong the feeling of satiety you get, decreasing the chances you snack between meals.

This in turn may help you stick with that reduced calorie intake, yielding faster fat loss.

If you feel hungry 24 hours a day on your diet, check your protein intake. It may not be high enough to curb these hunger pains.

Get extra protein the easy way with a protein shake

Faster Recovery

For those concerned with sports performance, protein can also help improve your overall recovery rates.

By taking in protein immediately after a workout session, it’ll help you bounce back quicker between each session.

Consider purchasing a whey isolate protein powder for this purpose as it’s designed to be the fastest digesting protein.

Metabolic Management

Finally, a high protein diet is also important for helping you master your metabolism.

If you feel like a sluggish metabolic rate is preventing you from seeing the fat loss results you want, adding more protein to your diet will help.

Protein rich foods require more energy to break down and digest, thus some of the energy contained in the foods is used for this process.

As a result, you ‘net’ fewer calories overall.

To put this into perspective, if you have two people, each eating 2000 calories per day but one is eating 150 grams of protein and another just 100 grams, that person eating 150 grams will net around 50 calories less per day simply due to their higher protein intake.

While this seems small, at the end of a month, that’s an added bit of fat lost despite eating the same total number of calories per day.

So how much protein should you eat? To put a high protein diet to work in your life, aim to include around 1.5 grams per kilo of body weight of protein per day.

Those on more intense exercise program may wish to take this up slightly higher to 2 grams per kilo per day for a period of time.